Secure Management for Cryptographic Infrastructure

Ensuring a secure and reliable infrastructure requires constant attention and adaptation to ever-changing throughput rates, emerging compliance mandates, and expanding functional requirements. Typically, management of these solutions requires multiple administrators and key officers to regularly visit each cryptographic device, often spread between geographically dispersed data centers. With the Guardian9000, the difficulty of these management tasks can be greatly reduced or even eliminated altogether.

Alerting, Monitoring, and Intelligent Load Distribution

Using the Guardian9000, multiple Futurex solutions can be centrally and easily configured, managed, and monitored. The Guardian9000 automatically conducts diagnostic monitoring of the vital system parameters, throughput rates, and error messages of connected client devices. Real-time alerts and notifications are available via SMTP, SNMP, and SMS, which ensure that systems administrators and central network monitoring tools are able to constantly watch infrastructure health and status as well as receive proactive alerts in critical situations.

For electronic payment environments where debit transactions are processed, one of the unique features of the Guardian9000 is its ability to monitor when exhaustive PIN attacks may be occurring and to alert network administrators should such an attack occur. Along with monitoring and alerting capabilities, the Guardian also offers full system redundancy, which detects if managed devices become unavailable and automatically redistributes transaction loads to available backup hardware with zero downtime. These features will assist in your system running smoothly and efficiently.

Active–Active Redundancy

With the Guardian9000, organizations are capable of creating a scalable, redundant environment for managing multiple client Futurex devices within several cohesive groups that operate faster and more effectively than a standalone device. This grouping also provides fault tolerance for the individual Futurex devices. For example, if one unit fails or must be taken offline, the other units automatically absorb the transaction load, preventing system unavailability or downtime.

Maintaining a data encryption infrastructure with multiple active Guardian9000 load balancing and monitoring devices provides added efficiency as well as protection against full data center outages. These units synchronize automatically, providing direct load balancing for their own dependent Futurex devices and redundant failover for devices belonging to other Guardian9000 units.

Streamlines Operation and Ensures Compliance

Performing firmware updates and log audits typically take days for organizations with multiple cryptographic devices spread across multiple data centers, but these tasks can now be accomplished from one centrally located Guardian9000.

With the Guardian9000, a number of compliance requirements can be fulfilled from a central location:

Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) and Short Message Service (SMS) allows administrators to be notified by e-mail or mobile phone should any technical issues with the Guardian9000 or a client device arise

Should a managed device fail or become unavailable, the Guardian9000 will redistribute the transaction load to the remaining available devices in the group and re-add the device when connectivity has been restored